from the urls-we-dig-up dept

American highways are slowly filling up with Crossover vehicles that drive like a car but have some of the height and space of an SUV. Sedans still outnumber Crossovers, but this non-car-non-SUV segment is growing rapidly. The Toyota RAV4 came out in 1994, but in 1991, a car design no one of a certain age will ever forget made its debut on The Simpsons. The Homer will have the last laugh. Here are some links to prove it.

from the what-was-the-problem-again? dept

One of the favorite tropes of the anti-piracy crowd is that all this unauthorized sharing is killing culture, pauperizing artists and generally making the world go to hell in a handbasket. The only pieces of evidence adduced in support of that position are the market reports put together for the copyright industries that (a) say the sky is falling and (b) base that analysis on the industries' own unsubstantiated claims.

In fact, as we know, for all of the copyright industries, the Sky is Rising. But that's only half the story, for alongside the traditional distribution channels, there are now entirely new ways in which people can create and share their creations. These have only emerged in the last few years, and so there is a natural tendency to underestimate their importance. But gradually figures are emerging that hint at the extraordinary scale of the creativity they foster.

What the use of Google's Content ID means is that the stuff copyright companies care about is already being caught. What's left varies from high-art mashups to how-to manuals to cat videos. But whatever it is, there's lots of it, with millions of hours of new content being uploaded every year.

Listed among the top 10 social networks and blogs in the U.S. by Nielsen in 2011, Wikia sees nearly 50 million global unique visitors per month, has over 339,000 communities (600 new ones added daily), and is witnessing 42% traffic growth year-over-year.

More specifically, gaming and entertainment communities have been Wikia’s bread and butter. The site hosts over 65k game wikis with 2.48M game pages. Elder Scrolls, for example has 8k+ content pages and it would take a month to read them all at 5 minutes per page.

Putting these kind of figures together with the daily output of hundreds of millions of users on Twitter and its Chinese analogs -- to say nothing of the near-billion Facebookers -- and what emerges is a ferment of creativity the likes of which the world has never seen before. So how can this be squared with the repeated claims that piracy is somehow leading to the death of culture?

I think the answer is that in the eyes of many commentators all this activity simply "doesn't count". That is, a video on YouTube is not "real" art, and a Tumblr post is not "real" literature. So when people complain that piracy is "killing" culture, what they are really expressing is their own incomprehension in the face of this new kind of art.

To admit that piracy isn't a problem, because it seems to be leading to more, not less creativity, would be to admit that the huge outpourings of user-generated content are indeed art, some of it even rather good art. And that, rather than any supposed harm from unauthorized sharing of copyright materials, is what many seem to fear. For the copyright industries and cultural commentators it calls into question their ability to make aesthetic judgments -- and hence money -- while for the artists, it questions their privileged position in society, and the special role of their art there.

from the that-would-send-a-statement dept

As more and more internet operations recognize the horrors of SOPA, they're stepping up to do stuff about it. The latest is that Wikipedia is considering a blackout on the site in protest -- a move that might actually catch Congress' attention because people in Congress actually use Wikipedia all the time. There's a discussion on the site concerning whether or not Wikipedia should make this move, and it's not a bad time to add your thoughts to the discussion. Most of the discussion so far appears to be in favor, but more thoughts can only help. The idea is to model this on the rather powerful message that was sent back in October when Wikipedia blocked access to its Italian version in protest of a new wiretapping law.

from the domain-oddities dept

I had seen the BBC article from a week or so ago about Jimmy Wales talking about the complexity of Wikipedia and how it needs to improve, but hadn't read all the way to the end where there was a rather interesting tidbit. Copycense however alerted us to this little bit of trivia at the end about how Wikipedia's sorta sister company Wikia owns some Wikileaks domain names... including Wikileaks.com:

Technically, the Wikia company has until this week legally owned domain names including wikileaks.net, wikileaks.com and wikileaks.us.

"We transferred the domains to them but they never completed the technical part," said Mr Wales. "All they needed to do was sign in and complete the transfer but they have never done it."

He said the domains had been registered "defensively" when Wikileaks launched in 2006.

"When they first launched they put out a press release that said the 'Wikipedia of secrets', which would have been a trademark violation.

"So someone in the office registered two or three domains."

He said that he regularly tries to prompt Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange to complete the transaction, to no avail.

"I saw someone else say that he's prone to saying 'I'm busy fighting superpowers' and that's exactly what he said to me."

Mr Wales said the domains would expire "this week".

"I'm not renewing them," said Mr Wales.

"We may ping them and say they are loose."

Of course, I just checked the whois on the .com and the .net, and both say they're registered until 2012... so someone renewed the domains, but it's not clear who.

from the is-singing-along-without-a-license-the-next-to-go? dept

In August, we wrote how music publishers were suing lyrics sites (and their owners) for daring to "profit off the backs of songwriters." That, of course, makes no sense. People go to find lyrics to music because they already like it and want to find out more about it and the creators behind it. It's good advertising. And yet, publishers have been going after lyrics sites for years. Apparently, the guy behind LyricWiki worked out a deal whereby technically he's shutting down LyricWiki (found via Fan History) but is instead rebuilding the project for Wikia (the company associated with Wikipedia). Wikia has purchased a license from the publishers. While it's good that a lawsuit is being avoided and that the project will continue (sort of), it's still rather troubling that the publishers were able to force LyricWiki into Wikia's arms. Apparently, independently repeating lyrics of a song you like isn't allowed unless you buy a license. Careful singing along... that'll be next.

from the good-ideas dept

It always seems misguided when people complain about quality problems in Wikipedia while ignoring identical quality problems in other media -- and the fact that it's easier and faster to make corrections in Wikipedia when those errors are discovered. One thing that defenders of Wikipedia often point out, is that it's easy to check the history page of any Wikipedia entry to get a sense of whether or not a particular tidbit of info has survived the test of time or was just recently dumped on the page (or if there's been any controversy over it). However, the truth is not too many people actually bother to check the history page (even among those who bring it up as a defense of Wikipedia). It appears that Wikipedia may start experimenting with a creative idea to help deal with this: color coding sections of Wikipedia entries. If a change was made by a new or untrustworthy user, Wikipedia could color code it as red so any readers would know to be even more skeptical than usual about that information. As the information survives the test of time, then it could fade to black (so to speak). At the same time, users who have a long history of making trustworthy edits would have their edits more quickly "trusted" within the color coded system. It's a creative idea that seems to make a lot of sense for improving the overall quality of Wikipedia. It's almost a shame we can't do the same thing with other forms of media as well. The plan is apparently to test this system on the smaller Wikia community before rolling it out on Wikipedia, but it seems like an experiment worth following.

from the like-a-broken-record dept

Wikia, Jimmy Wales' for-profit venture, has been talking for awhile about taking on Google in the search space. The company believes it can do better by augmenting traditional algorithm-based search with wiki-like collaboration and human editors. So far, the company doesn't have anything to show for its efforts, but it recently announced the purchase of the open source web crawler Grub from LookSmart (remember them?). As part of the company's PR efforts, Wales has tried to make the case that existing search tools are "broken" and that another party needs to come along and fix it. This same line, that Google is broken for whatever reasons, gets repeated by every fledgling search startup out there. While Google has its share of problems (spam, etc.), it's unlikely that most users would see things as being so bad. In the end, neither FUD nor buzzwords, like "wiki", "open source" or "semantic web" will be enough to dethrone Google if the underlying product isn't clearly superior.